escort storage question=

[jamesmetairie]

I want to park the 1999 escort lx in the yard and put a cover on it. And cancel the insurance ! We,ll put it back into service it if one of our other cars becomes unuseable.
THE PLAN = 1) Keep the gas tank very lowand add fuel stabilizer . Hopefully if I run the engine for about 30 minutes on idle each month the battery will remain charged. Also the gas will burn up and i,ll add a fresh gallon.
2) Change the oil every 5 or 6 months .
3) Move the car slightly every month so the tires don,t get out of round.
4) car is located in the new orleans area. open all 4 doors and let it air out monthly.

Does this sound like I,m on the right track?? Thanks for any advice. Jim.

[AzTumbleweed]

Sounds good to me except possibly less chance of condensation if the fuel tank is full.

If it's going to be parked during hurricane seasone then strap pontoons to it.

[mightymoose_22]

I agree... fill the tank.

[RocketUSA]

Personally, I'd support it with jackstands too. Not enough to put it up in the air and be a hazard, but enough to take the pressure off the tires. Make sure the tires are out of the sun, I don't know how far down the cover goes. One last thing, I recently got a battery charger that can be left on 24/7, it just requires that you check the water level in the battery monthly to make sure nothing wacky happened with boil-off issues.

[Selectron]

A few years ago I had full use of a company vehicle, so my Escort (UK diesel) sat unused and unmoved for about a year and a half. One of the tyres sustained some damage - a whole lot of tiny cracks in the side wall at the bottom where it had been bulging a little all that time under the weight. If I was storing it again, I'd probably over-inflate the tyres to give the side walls more rigidity, but still keeping them within the maximum permitted pressure. I'd also take the precaution of moving it forwards a foot every few weeks.

Main problem though was the battery. I didn't give it a regular charge, so after a few months the battery was a piece of scrap. Somebody at work was replacing their battery so I grabbed their old one which was still in reasonable condition, recharged it, installed it but then promptly neglected it again and it turned into scrap too, due to sulphation of the plates. Problem is that I'm in a top floor apartment so I have no driveway and no garage, so the car is kept parked out on the street so there was no way to hook a mains-powered charger to it. After that, I just removed the battery and left it without one until I was ready to put the car back into use.

When I did finally get around to putting it back into use, I put a new battery in it, cranked it, and it started first time on the original half-tank of diesel.

The steering was incredibly stiff first time I drove it - it doesn't have power steering by the way, and it did eventually free itself but that took a few weeks and a good few miles. It didn't come to any harm though; the steering is as good as new now and I've never had to replace anything.

At the first junction I came to, I pressed the brakes and nothing happened because the brakes were seized. Fortunately I was only rolling at walking speed and after I pressed the pedal a few more times the brakes freed up.

It's nearly always damp over here no matter if it's summer or winter so moss had started to grow in all the little nooks and crannies around the window seals, license plate, and in the little crevices between doors and body, but a few gallons of water and a couple of hours washing had it looking as good as new again.

I have more to say about the battery so I'll post again, later.

[Selectron]

The problem with storing a car and still leaving the battery in-circuit is the quiescent current drain, or parasitic drain - that's the current which continues to flow even when the ignition is switched off. On my car it's around thirty milliamps (30mA or 0.03A) and yours will probably be a similar figure. That current feeds the clock, the memory for the radio presets, the alarm module, and the volatile memory section within the Powertrain Control Module (PCM).

30mA isn't much current at all, so on a car which is driven regularly it's completely neglible. Put the car into storage though and it becomes very significant.

30mA x 24 hours = 0.72Ah (Ampere-hour) drain per day. Multiply that by seven and you have 5.04Ah drain per week. Multiply that by four and you have 20.16Ah drain over a four-week period. That's a lot of capacity to lose and you'll be lucky if the battery will still crank the engine after four weeks. Additionally, when a battery loses charge to that level, sulphation of the plates will start to occur which, if unchecked, will soon render the battery useless, and it really does, because I've done it twice.

If you have a garage and don't need for the alarm circuit to be active, then I'd recommend unhooking the battery negative terminal, in which case the battery will only discharge at its natural self-discharge rate which on a lead-acid battery is pretty low, and it will still crank the engine no problem even after a month.

If you need the alarm to be active or just want to keep the battery connected, then you might find that around three weeks is the maximum interval that you can leave before giving the battery a recharge. There are mains-powered chargers which are specially designed to be left continuously connected to a vehicle in storage, so that might be an option if you have a garage, and that would keep the battery in first-class condition.

I'm a very low-mileage driver at the moment, so my car often sits for periods of between a week and three weeks without being driven. I bought a solar-powered charging panel (14" x 5", with a 1.8 Watt output) with the intention of fitting it in the rear window, but I'm in an urban area and the panel looks pretty high-tech and expensive (even though it wasn't) and I'm afraid that somebody would break the window to steal it, so I've never used it.

My solution was to get a 12V, 37Ah capacity sealed lead-acid (SLA) battery which I can carry comfortably between home and car because it isn't too heavy. I built a voltage-doubler circuit, which takes a 12V input from the SLA, doubles it up to 24V (actually, around 22V because there are a couple of diode drops) and then put a voltage regulator stage on the output, set at 14.4V. So if my car sits for any longer than two weeks, then I hook my home-made charger up and leave it sitting in the car where the SLA will happily recharge my car battery via the cigarette lighter socket. Then after three days I unhook it and bring the SLA back up to the apartment to be recharged on my mains-powered bench charger. It all works very well in practice and it has been a neat solution.

Having said that though, I decided a couple of weeks ago to go ahead and take a chance and install the solar panel so I'll be doing that soon, and hoping that I don't end up with a broken window.

Whatever solution you come up with though, do something to take care of the battery because if you routinely allow it to become deeply discharged, as I did, then it will quickly become irreversibly damaged.

[denisond3]

I agree with most all thats been said. Just disconnecting the battery in our Escort allows it to start up again after reconnecting it - even though our Escort will sit unused for 6 months of each year. We live in south Texas in the winters, and in the suburbs of the nation's capitol in the the summer. So all of our cars get to sit for 6 months unused. All of them sit with disconnected batteries.
I would not start it monthly at all. Unless you run the car on the highway for 20 or 30 minutes, you wont get the motor oil up to be really warm - and the pollutants that get mixed into the oil when an engine is running cool, will not get boiled out. You would just be getting the oil cruddy, and the inside of the engine coated with that crud.
I would have a cover/tarp over the car if possible, including covering the grill to keep out blown fog. Where we live in Texas this can be done by parking the car facing away from the Gulf of Mexico.
If you cant park the car on pavement, then try to get it elevated on piles of wooden blocks. You could even put a vapor barrier (heavy polyethylene sheet) on the ground and park it over that. A tremendous amount of moisture evaporates up through the ground on any summer day - or even winter days in southern Louisiana. Otherwise this moisture will condense on the metal parts of the underside of the car, and it will be wet under there 365 days a year, for at least 12 hours of every day.
I personally like to put lots of cakes of camphor inside a car I am going to store outside. It discourages rodents, ants, and slows down mildew.

[jamesmetairie]

for many years i went to sea for a living . my car or truck would be in a storage parking lot for 4 or 5 months at a time. i remember on several occasions the alternator went bad. i wonder if moisture develops in it and because the engine isn,t run regular it just stays wet and ruins the alternator.

[indiaautox]

Good discussion for escort storage?

[denisond3]

And its good advice for storing -any- car outdoors. Another thing I find is that brake lines will rust on an Escort. I have had to replace a couple of the brake lines to the rear brakes on our 92 and 94 Escorts.